The Real Meaning of Memorial Day

It’s Memorial Day weekend. Great, right? I plan to spend a lot of my three days off digging in the yard.

How about yours? Planning to break out the grill for the first time, and have friends over? Or perhaps risk an e coli infection and go to the beach, as a recent item in the June issue of Men’s Health warns?

Conspicuously absent in my list of activities, and maybe yours too, is any of that “remembering” that Memorial Day takes its name from. Just like the ironically named Labor Day, when nobody works, we also memorialize this holiday by forgetting what it’s for.

And in this case, the memories are in fact very painful, especially for men. Because Memorial Day is about remembering our war dead, and for the most part that means specifically remembering the sacrifices that men, and for the large part ONLY men, have made in war. I’m not, of course, belittling the contributions of women to war efforts. They have been many. One of the major ones throughout our nation’s history, though, has been mothers’ and wives’ willingness to see their sons and husbands head off to war to be maimed or to die.

If you do a little research into the grim statistics of war dead, you can pretty quickly come up with a number who have gave what President Lincoln called “the last full measure of devotion.” That number, combined for all of our national wars, is 1,321,612. The odd thing about that number, horrifying as it is, is that the statisticians don’t bother to state the gender of those casualties. By my experience, statisticians live to make distinctions in their tallies, breaking them down with Moneyball obsessiveness, until the eyes glaze over.

But with those 1,321,612, the demographics of the dead doesn’t really matter. They are just casualties. So I’ll make the distinction the accountants don’t. By the rough estimates I’ve been able to dig up, you need to subtract about 158—the number of female war casualties—from that total to arrive at the number of men who have died in our wars.

I’m not belittling the 143 women who died in the various wars on terror, or the 16 who perished in Vietnam. Full honors, regrets, and memories are due to them.

But that leaves 1,321,453 men dead on the battlefields, absent from their family dinners, absent from the gene pool, absent from their own lives going forward, for which they no doubt had dreams and hopes.

Tell me, why are men alone singled out for this slaughter? Is it because they’re tough guys, and can take the carnage? Each year, more military men commit suicide than were killed in battle during all the years of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, combined. Is that tough guy behavior? Or is it an indication that men are just as vulnerable to the emotional distress of battle as anyone might be. Given that the overall suicide rates of men dwarf those of women, perhaps it’s a sign that men are even more vulnerable to emotional distress than women. You could certainly make a case that, because men allow themselves fewer emotional outlets than women do, they’re more likely succumb when the going gets tough, in the words of the old macho mantra.

So I don’t buy the John Wayne argument for sending men to war. After all, John Wayne himself was really just a guy named Marion Morrison. The manly name was something he adopted, to look tough.

So to with a lot of us tough-looking guys. We take on behaviors and tasks to live up to an image of what and who we should be.

That’s why societies have been able to rely on our masculine sense of duty to prime us to do the dirty work of war. The fact that the age-old recruiting statement “dulce et decorum est pro patria mori” was crafted in a dead language speaks volumes. For those of you who don’t speak Latin, I’ll translate for you: “It is sweet and right to die for your country.” Somehow nobody thought to add “if you’re a man,” because that part is understood, even today.

Wilfred Owen, the great British poet, served and died in World War 1. He evokes, and eviscerates, that phrase in the title of a great poem he wrote during his service in the trenches.

I’ll read from the end of it.

If you could hear, at every jolt, the bloodCome gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, My friend, you would not tell with such high zest To children ardent for some desperate glory, The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est Pro patria mori.

Note that even Owen uses the inclusive term “children,” who are being persuaded by the lie. He might have just said “boys.”

I believe that wars are necessary. I also believe that the lives lost in them have, at times, been heroically surrendered to fight greed and evil in the world. But I also believe that, on a long weekend when we mostly manage to forget those sacrifices, that we men in particular need to be aware that it is men who go to war, men who die in war, and men who deserve the credit and our thanks when war produces peace, prosperity, and justice in the world.

A Part of Hearst Digital Media
Men's Health participates in various affiliate marketing programs, which means we may get paid commissions on editorially chosen products purchased through our links to retailer sites.